Google bypassed Apple privacy settings: report

It's a tense time for Google: controversial policy and user-experience changes are combining with a growing distrust of tracking and advertising to produce something of a toxic atmosphere. Not the moment, then, you would want a minor scandal to erupt in the form of Google circumventing, intentionally or unintentionally, the privacy settings of millions of Safari users. The allegations have their source in a report by Stanford grad student Jonathan Mayer, who showed that using Safari triggered a special behavior in the normal cookie-creation process; his report was later played up by the Wall Street Journal. This behavior deliberately goes around the default Safari behavior of blocking all third-party cookies — like one from Google when you're visiting TechCrunch. Google says it's a side-effect from something else, but even if that's true, it's still ugly.

Google has been actively circumventing the privacy settings of desktop and iOS Safari users, according to an investigation by the Wall Street Journal. The paper claims that even though Safari&#8217;s ...